The World of Playing cards is a terrific site with reproductions of historic cards from around the world. Most recently, they shared Snapshots: A Missionary Card Game from the Church Mission Society circa 1910. It’s described as a basic set-building game of 48 cards with 12 sets from representing different cultural practices around the world. Each set has four cards, [Read More...]

“Outside the mine we are Catholics, and when we enter the mine, we worship the devil.” This jarring quote is found in an excellent story on BBC News about the grim working conditions on Bolivia’s Cerro Rico mountain, where men and boys scratch out a precarious living in the place known as the Mountain That Eats [Read More...]

I miss Michael Crichton. It’s not just that he was a marvelous storyteller who could spot a trend ten years away and turn it into a ripping good yarn, but that he had a clarity and honesty in his writings and speeches about science and society that is sorely needed today. His skeptical approach to [Read More...]

One strange new spectacle of the information age is the accelerating lifespan of fads. Things flash across the web, are seen by millions, and then vanish. The social media drawing game Draw Something was, for a brief time, the biggest game in the world. It was so huge that social gaming powerhouse Zynga paid $200 [Read More...]

The oldest preserved hominid footprints found outside of Africa have been found, and push back the date for a hominid presence in England to almost a million years ago. I’ll just get out of the way and let the Independent tell you the news: Extraordinary new evidence of Britain’s first human inhabitants has been discovered [Read More...]

This one is just for the Biblical Archaeology wonks: a listing of all the dig activity conducted in Israel for 2013, with reports on what was uncovered. I covered most of the marquee finds throughout the year, but this listing provides detailed information on everything from Afula to Zippori. [Read more...]

“Check Your Privilege” is the modern rebranding of political correctness, which in turn was an aggressive rebranding of “consciousness raising,” and THAT was just plain old cultural Marxism. It’s the idea that society is inherently homogeneous, and therefore automatically represses those who are–to use the modern word–”others.” Certain people, so the theory goes, accrue privilege [Read More...]

Note: This is the last in a series which looks at the real history of Tarot. I do not deny that Tarot has occult connections which are seriously problematic for Catholics. This series is not about fortune telling, but about cultural history and gaming. I was beginning to worry that God and the Machine would be All [Read More...]